Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild [Abstract Painting] (2001) is an exquisite testament to the artist’s unparalleled command of abstract language and his enduring fascination with the interstitial space between chance and control. Belonging to a series of ten Abstract Painting works that share the same dimensions, Richter created a total of thirty six in 2001. Executed with the squeegee, a tool Richter adopted in the 1980s, this work exemplifies his technique of layering, rubbing, and scraping paint across the canvas to generate compositions of stunning complexity and depth. The result is a shimmering, gem-like surface where colours merge and diverge, suggesting both fluidity and structure in equal measure. Richter’s use of the squeegee enables him to explore the unpredictable behaviour of paint, creating striations and patterns that seem to hover on the edge of dissolution, giving Abstraktes Bild a sense of suspended movement.

The Abstract Painting series, initiated in 1977, represents a major trajectory within Richter’s oeuvre. In these works, the artist balances intention with the inherent unpredictability of the medium, allowing chance to play a pivotal role in each composition. The squeegee, with its rubber edge, transforms the act of painting into a tactile engagement with the canvas, its sweeping gestures pulling and blending pigment in ways that defy precise control. Richter spends hours, sometimes days, reworking his canvases until a satisfactory balance is achieved, often layering and removing paint in a process that yields richly textured surfaces. This technique allows for a dynamic interplay between colour and form, generating compositions that appear at once meticulous and spontaneous.

In Abstraktes Bild [Abstract Painting], bands of colour stretch across the canvas, mingling and blurring into one another in a fashion reminiscent of photographic blur – a motif that alludes to Richter’s early explorations in photorealism, a genre he began experimenting with in 1961. While these earlier works focused on the meticulous reproduction of photographs, his abstract paintings represent a different kind of photographic reference: the compositional blurring of form and tone evokes the indistinctness of a fleeting image, as if captured at the threshold between clarity and obscurity. This sense of ambiguity allows Abstraktes Bild to oscillate between abstraction and figuration, inviting the viewer to discern landscapes or figures within its non-representational surface.

Richter’s palette in Abstraktes Bild exhibits a subtle yet powerful luminosity, with each colour blending seamlessly into the next to create an iridescent harmony. The painting’s gem-like surface, created through multiple layers of overlaid pigments, offers a tactile richness that recalls mineral or crystalline structures, rendered soft and malleable through the artist’s hand. The hues are intensified by the layering process, creating a depth that seems to push outward from the canvas, compelling the viewer to engage with the painting from various angles to capture its full range of colour and texture.

This abstract approach also reflects Richter’s profound interest in the relationship between perception and reality. By blending and obscuring colour, he challenges viewers’ ability to define a focal point, thereby immersing them in an experience of pure visual sensation. The work’s surface appears in constant flux, as though the colours might continue to evolve if one were to look away and return – a quality that speaks to Richter’s understanding of painting as a temporal, experiential medium. Each squeegee stroke reveals new patterns while simultaneously obscuring others, creating a layered effect that resists any singular interpretation.

Ultimately, Abstraktes Bild [Abstract Painting] stands as a powerful expression of Richter’s unique vision, where the boundaries between painting and photographic effect, order and chaos, are dissolved into a single, cohesive field of colour and movement. The painting invites a contemplative engagement with the materiality of paint itself, encouraging viewers to navigate the tension between presence and absence, clarity and ambiguity. Richter’s abstract compositions remind us that the experience of art is as much about what is withheld as what is revealed – a balancing act of intuition and method, which he has honed to a point of masterful subtlety. Abstraktes Bild is not only a visual spectacle but also a philosophical inquiry into the nature of perception, inviting viewers to question the very essence of what it means to see.